The Heart Goes Last

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She’s on her own.

IX | POSSIBILIBOTS Lunch

Stan’s in the Possibilibots cafeteria with the guys from his team – his new team, the team he’s just been inserted into. He’s having a beer, that weak, pissy beer they’re brewing now; plus a side of onion rings and some fries to share, and a platter of Buffalo wings. Sucking the fat off a wing, he reflects that he himself might have tended the owner of this wing when it had been covered with feathers and attached to a chicken.

The guys on his team look normal enough, just ordinary guys sitting around in the cafeteria having lunch, like him. Not young, not old; fit enough, though a couple of them are getting plump around the middle. They’ve all got nametags. His says WALDO, and he really needs to remember that his name is Waldo now, not Stan. All he has to do is to stay Waldo until someone hands him the flashdrive with the hot-potato crap he’s supposed to be smuggling out and reveals what he’s supposed to do to make it through the gate. Or else until he figures out how to make a break for it on his own.

Tiptoe Through the Tulips is supposed to be the signal, the secret handshake. Will his unknown contact speak it or sing it? He hopes there won’t be singing. Who chose that annoying tune? Jocelyn, naturally: along with her other complex personality traits, she has a warped sense of humour. She’d relish the idea of making some poor sod croak out that brain-damaged ditty. Not one of the guys at lunch looks like the Tiptoe Through the Tulips kind; nor do any of them look like a possible undercover contact. But then, they wouldn’t.

Waldo, Waldo, he tells himself. You are Waldo now. It’s a feeble name, like something in a kids’ kitten book. The other names around the table are more solid: Derek, Kevin, Gary, Tyler, Budge. He’s only just met them, he knows nothing about them, so he has to keep his mouth shut and his ears open. And they know nothing about him except that he’s been sent to fill a vacancy on their team.

There’ve been a lot of yuks at the lunch table, a lot of in-jokes that Stan didn’t catch. He’s trying to read the facial expressions: behind the genial grins there’s a barrier, behind which a language foreign to him is being spoken, a language of obscure references. Around the room, at other cafeteria tables, there are other knots of men. Other Possibilibots teams would be his guess. He’s doing a lot of guessing.

The cafeteria is a long room with light green walls. Frosted-glass windows down one side: you can’t see out. On the side without the windows there are a couple of retro-looking posters. One of them shows a little girl of six or seven in a ruffled white nightie, rubbing one eye sleepily, a blue teddy bear cradled in the crook of her other arm. There’s a steaming cup of something in the foreground. SLEEP TIGHT, says the slogan. It’s like a hundred-year-old poster for a malted bedtime drink.

The other poster shows a pretty blond girl in a red and white polka-dot bikini and a pin-up pose, hands clasped around one drawn-up knee, the foot in a slingback red high heel; the other leg extended, the shoe dangling from her toe. Pouty red lips, a wink. Some writing in, it must be, Dutch.

“Looks like a real girl, yeah?” says Derek, nodding at the pin-up girl. “But it’s not.”

“Fooled me too,” says Tyler. “They did that poster in a fifties style. Those Dutch are so far ahead of us!”

“Yeah, they’ve passed the legislation and everything,” says Gary. “They anticipated the future.”

“What’s it say?” Stan asks. He knows what they’re making at Possibilibots. Replica women; slut machines, some call them. There was earnest talk about them among the fellow scooter-repair guys: the real-life pain they might prevent, the money they might make. Maybe all women should be robots, he thinks with a tinge of acid: the flesh and blood ones are out of control.

“It’s Dutch, so who knows what it says exactly,” says Kevin. “But something like Better than real,” says Kevin.

“And is it?” says Stan. “Better than real?” He’s feeling more relaxed now – nobody suspects him of not being Waldo – so he can risk a few offhand questions.

“Not exactly. But the voice options are great,” says Derek. “You can have silent, or, like, moans and screams, even a few words: more, harder, like that.”

“In my books they’re not the same,” says Gary, head on one side as if tasting some new menu choice. “I didn’t go for it that much, myself. It was too, you know, mechanical. But some guys prefer it. No limp-dick worries if you fuck up.”

“So to speak,” says Tyler, and they all laugh.

“You need to fiddle with the settings,” says Kevin, reaching over for the last onion ring. “It’s like a bicycle seat, you need to make the adjustments. You guys want another round of beers? I’ll get them.”

“I vote yes,” says Tyler. “And throw in some more of those hot wings.”

“Maybe you just picked the wrong model,” says Budge to Gary.

“I don’t think they’ll ever replace the living and breathing,” says Gary.

“They said that about e-books,” says Kevin. “You can’t stop progress.”

“With the Platinum grade, they do breathe,” says Derek. “In, out. I prefer that. With the ones that don’t breathe, you sense there’s something missing.”

“Some have got heartbeats too,” says Kevin. “If you want to get fancy. That’s the Platinum Plus.”

“They should stick some knee pads into the kit, anyway,” says Gary. “My one got stuck in high gear, I skinned my knees, damn near crippled myself, and I couldn’t turn the damn thing off.”

“You might like that feature in a real one,” says Kevin, who’s back with the beers and wings. “No Turn-off button.”

“Trouble is, with some of the real ones, there’s no Turn-on button,” says Tyler, and this time it’s laughs all round. Stan joins in: he can relate to that.

“But you need to remind yourself they’re not alive; they’re that good, at the top grade anyway,” Derek says to Stan. Of all of them, he seems the biggest booster.

“We should let old Waldo try it out,” says Tyler. “We all did, first chance we had! Give him a test run. What about it, Waldo?”

“It’s not officially allowed,” says Gary. “Unless you’ve been assigned for it.”

“But they turn a blind eye,” says Tyler.

Stan gives what he hopes is a lascivious grin. “I’m game,” he says.

“Bad boy,” says Tyler lightly.

“So you don’t mind bending the rules,” says Budge. “Pushing the boundaries.” He gives Stan a genial smile, the smile of an indulgent uncle.

“Depends, I guess,” Stan says. Has he made a mistake, put himself at risk? “There’s boundaries, and then there’s boundaries.” That should hold it steady for a while.

“Okay then,” says Budge. “First the tour, then the test run. Step this way.”

Egg Cup

Charmaine slept poorly last night, even though she was in her own bed. Of course this bed isn’t really hers, it belongs to Consilience, but still, it’s a bed she’s used to. Or she was used to it when Stan was in there with her. But now it feels alien to her, like one of those scary movies where you wake up and find you’re on a spaceship, and you’ve been abducted, and people you thought were your friends have had their brains taken over, and they want to do kinky probes; because Stan isn’t in this bed with her any more and he will never be in it again. Face it, she tells herself: you kissed him goodbye and then you stuck the needle into him, and he died. That’s reality, and it doesn’t matter how much you cry about it now because he’s still dead and you can’t bring him back.

Think about flowers, she tells herself. That’s what Grandma Win would tell her. But she can’t think about them. Flowers are for funerals, that’s all she can see. White flowers; like the white room, the white ceiling.

She hadn’t meant to kill him. She hadn’t meant to kill him. But how else could she have acted? They wanted her to use her head and discard her heart; but it wasn’t so easy, because the heart goes last and hers was still clinging on inside her all the time she was readying the needle, which is why she was crying the whole time. Then the next thing she knew, she was lying on her own sofa with a headache.

At least she didn’t have a concussion. That’s what they told her at the Consilience clinic after the CAT scan. They’d sent her home with three kinds of pills – a pink one, a green one, and a yellow one – to help her relax, they said. She hadn’t taken those pills, however: she didn’t know what was in them. Slipping a person some kind of knockout thing was what those aliens did before they got you onto their spaceship, and then you woke up with tubes going into you, right in the middle of a probe. There aren’t any aliens really; but still, she didn’t trust what might happen to her while she was sleeping like a baby.

“You’ll sleep like a baby” was what Aurora had said about those pills. She’d been at the clinic, waiting for Charmaine. They were all in on it, whatever it was: Aurora, and Max, and that woman who’d driven her to the clinic, the woman with dark hair and hoop earrings.

Thinking about what happened, Charmaine feels maybe she shouldn’t have blurted out, “You’re the head in the box!” Telling a person they were a head in a box was too blunt.